"Generations"

 Dear Reader,

 

Your expressions of concern have been appreciated, even when I have not responded. Typing is still difficult, though I can now use (awkwardly) both hands. The attached essay was begun before my fall, thus easier to complete. 

 

I recognize there are software products that allow dictation, but not being one who speaks, let alone writes, in complete sentences, they are less helpful to me. I constantly revise what I have written, even to the extent of moving around sentences and paragraphs, often to the delete file. And I don’t want to confuse Siri. 

 

While my shoulder is improving and its range of motion is better than it was, it will be at least another week or two before my next TOTD is finished. The working title is “Conformity – The Death Knell for Freedom.”

 

Thanks for your patience and understanding. I hope you enjoy this essay.

 

Best regards,

 

Sydney

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Generations”

March 26, 2022

 

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new.”

                                                                                                                Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

                                                                                                                Walden, 1854

 

If we are lucky, we know five generations: grandparents, parents, ours, our children and grandchildren. Together, those lives cover over 200 years. I knew all my grandparents. My maternal grandfather died at age 68 in 1947. I remember him but not well. The first born of my grandparents, my paternal grandfather, was born in 1873 and died just shy of his 90^th birthday in 1963. The youngest, my maternal grandmother, was born in 1888, but succumbed to cancer in 1961 at age 72. My paternal grandmother, born in 1875, lived the longest. She met two of our three children and lived to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in July 1969, dying two months later. Some of my ten grandchildren, all born in the first decade of the 21^st Century, may live to see the 22^nd.

 

As children, we heard stories of the past and dreamt of what lay ahead; now, as grandparents, we dwell on what was and pray the future will be good for our children and grandchildren. It is parents who provide stability, as Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”  It is in children that opportunity flourishes: “The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation,” wrote Pearl Buck in The Goddess Abides.

 

My paternal grandfather was born 149 years ago, twenty years before the first gasoline-powered car was road tested by the Duryea brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts. The first subway in the U.S. was opened in Boston (where he lived) in 1897, three years after he had graduated from Harvard College. Politically, his life spanned the Presidencies of Ulysses Grant to John F. Kennedy. Militarily, his life witnessed the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and he saw the first Marines sent to South Vietnam. He was nine when Thomas Edison formed the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in New York but was 52 before half the homes in the United States had electricity. He was 30 when Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the Kitty Hawk Flyer in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. He was 78 when the British De Havilland Comet made the first commercial jet flight from London to Johannesburg. During his lifetime, the nation went from horse and carriage to automobiles, from Jim Crow to Civil Rights, from twice daily newspapers to network television news. His wife, my grandmother, was refused a degree from M.I.T. because she was a woman, despite six years of study during the late 1890s and early 1900s. She was forty-five before the 19^th Amendment was ratified, giving her the right to vote. Yet her granddaughters all graduated from college and were eligible to vote on their 21^st birthdays. There is much accomplishment in a person’s life.

 

While my grandparents, early on, lived 19^th Century lives, a period about which we read, our grandchildren will live lives unimaginable to us on their final lap. Generations allow us to personalize history – to read of an era in which our parents and grandparents lived, knowing they were then as alive as we are now: They read newspapers and books, discussed world events, played sports, visited friends, loved their spouses and families and experienced all the emotions we now feel – love, hurt, want, envy, passion, desire, joy, drive, trust and distrust. Each generation has its time to be alive, to laugh and cry, to work and to play, and to rest and recover. We should remember that our grandparents were grandchildren to those born in the early years of the Republic. George Washington, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony and Abraham Lincoln are not just names in history books, but were once living, breathing souls.

 

The view in the rearview mirror is clearer than the fog that envelopes the road ahead. With grandchildren, one wonders, what lies ahead? Will telecommuting become common and cities lose populations? Will knowledge of one’s genetic profile permit personalized medicine? Will self-driving cars obviate the need to learn to drive? Will genetically engineered plants lower food costs? Will a sharing economy replace the concept of private property? Will we be subject to the whims of someone or some agency that determines what we consume? As the amount of knowledge in the world increases, will the forest be lost for the trees?

 

Now in my 80s, I look back to find answers, knowing that human character doesn’t change – that good and evil always exist. I think of personal lessons learned, which lend credence to the observation that wisdom is gained through experience, not instruction: Of being admonished by my maternal grandmother to remember my grandfather who had recently died – for when you do, she said, he will live on in your memory. I think of the hurt inflicted on a young woman, when in the 8^th grade I refused her invitation at a Sadie Hawkins dance, because she was not deemed pretty. Or the unprompted advice from a stranger, when at a gas station in my 1947 Ford, in the mid 1950s: don’t drive so fast along New Hampshire’s back roads! I recall a lesson from my boss Doug Wilmott in the summer of 1960. Growing homesick while working with a prospecting crew in Canada’s Northwest Territories, I told him I wanted to go home. He quietly assured me of the value of persistence in building self-confidence. 

 

Mankind’s situation has improved over generations. A November 30, 1895 diary entry of a then eighty-five-year-old great-great grandfather reads: “It is difficult, even now, for us of the present generation to fully realize that so short a time ago, comparatively speaking, the very spot where we now reside, enjoying all the luxuries of a refined generation, was the home of ignorant savages. How much more surprising and interesting will this fact be to our children and descendants one of these days, if they can have such reliable accounts to refer to as it is here proposed to give them.” (His reference was to a proposed biography of his late wife’s great grandfather, Samuel Welles, who had purchased Indian lands in Natick and West Newton, Massachusetts in 1763.) Knowledge of the past, mixed with inherited values, leads to understanding.

 

I believe the reason we are here is to lead a happy, constructive and purposeful life. Along the way, we can familiarize our descendants with their antecedents, as each of us is a cog in a continuum of generations that bind us to the past even as we are projected into the future. My grandchildren have dreams – the future is theirs, even though they cannot control it. As Gandalf says to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Above all, I hope they find happiness, with someone to love and to love them back, as they, in turn, become parents and grandparents. I pray their lives will be happy, motivated and peaceful. We should cherish the generations.

"Some Friendly Advice to Mr. Biden"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Some Friendly Advice to Mr. Biden”

March 1, 2022

 

“Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain

this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in

the struggle that’s now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but 

a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the

beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.”

                                                                                           Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)

                                                                                           British House of Commons

June 8, 1982

(As quoted by Cal Thomas, February 24, 2022)

 

Right after President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, Rahm Emanuel, who served as White House Chief of Staff, famously said to never let a crisis go to waste. This evening, President Biden, facing the crisis that is Ukraine, should heed that advice when he speaks to the nation.

 

In a flurry of woke progressivism, the Administration has lost its way. The southern border is inundated by unvetted, unvaccinated illegal immigrants. Inflation is at 40-year highs. Schools that teach Critical Race Theory and encourage students to question their genders are upsetting parents. Crime rates have soared, especially in low-income areas of inner cities. People have grown weary of mask and vaccine mandates. School test scores, already low, have declined further.

 

Democrats, to survive in November, should go back to their roots of being the Party for working people – the middle class, small business owners, people who do not have the luxury to work remotely or send their children to private schools. They should abandon their left-wing, authoritarian over-reach. Despite being well-funded, the far-left, as defined by Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of “the Quad,” is represented by only nine percent of voters, according to an op-ed in Saturday’s The Wall Street Journal, an op-ed written by Elaine Kamarck and William Galston, both Democrats. 

 

Over the past several years, Democrats’ constituents have changed. The North East’s country club elites, who fifty years ago were Republicans, have become mainly Democrats. Wealthy Silicon Valley tycoons and Wall Street grandees resemble members of France’s ancien régime, unaware and uncaring of the needs of middle-class Americans, as they moralize behind their gated communities. These woke panjandrums were educated in elite universities by professors who abandoned classical liberalism to become intolerant of opposing opinions.

 

America is a centrist country, composed of middle-class, working Americans, many of whom have service jobs in hotels, restaurants and casinos. They drive taxis, buses and trucks. They work in hospitals, on road construction crews and in sewer treatment plants. This has meant that during the pandemic they either had to be at work or they did not get paid. It is estimated that more than a third of all American workers labor full or part time in the gig economy, many with multiple jobs, trying to stay ahead of rising inflation. Too many government rules, and demands for unionization, make their lives unnecessarily difficult. Thirty million small businesses, who employ almost half of all workers, are often ignored by politicians and harmed by complex regulations, which too often favor larger, better funded competitors. 

 

Joe Biden ran as a centrist on a platform that called for unity. Instead, he has heeded the call from the Party’s far left, with its woke message of division, with authoritarian overtones – censorship in schools, colleges, publishing houses, television, corporate boardrooms and social media; cancellation of speakers, careers and books that do not conform to the preferred message. Wokeism elevates race and gender over initiative and merit. 

 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should serve as a call to return to the center – that the nation’s enemies are neither school parents in Virginia nor truckers heading to Washington, D.C. Our enemies are those who threaten our democratic republic – Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Cuba. For years, our capitalistic system, where individuals are free to innovate and compete, has reduced poverty and lifted hopes around the world. The people in Ukraine, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, who lived under the Soviet Union, have witnessed what socialism does to one’s life. That is why they look west, not east. They understand better than the Sanders and the AOCs what happens when democracy fails, and authoritarianism prevails.

 

In his speech tonight, Mr. Biden has a chance to change course and gain the center. But will he? Will he remember the words of President Reagan, that “military strength is a prerequisite for peace?” Will he urge more oil and gas production to lower world prices, helping consumers and hurting Putin’s pocketbook? Will he stand with one of the world’s few Jewish heads of state, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or will he let another domino fall in the collapse of the world’s democracies? Will he abandon leftist policies that have increased crime in inner cities, let in millions of undocumented migrants, brought inflation to all, and, by putting identity politics and the “Green New Deal” ahead of defense spending, weakened our military? Will he follow Theodore Roosevelt’s advice to speak softly but carry a big stick, or will he bellow while he carries a twig? Will he reach out to Independents and Republicans? Will he remind us that the nation’s power is embedded in its people? Will he act as a unifier, or will he continue as a divider?

 

The problem of extremism is not limited to Democrats. Republicans have them as well, but they are neither so well-funded, nor as embedded in our culture as are Democrat extremists. I do not hold out much expectation that Mr. Biden will follow this advice; if he does not, that will be good for Republicans. But he has the opportunity to improve his Party’s chances in 2022 and 2024. It will be seizure of the middle that will win future elections.